The 2022 Monkey Dartboard Investing Invitational

It’s time for the second annual Monkey Dartboard Investing Invitational.

If you missed the first competition (held in 2021), check it out here.

And if you’re curious—yes, the monkeys won in 2021! The worst monkey saw their stock drop by 44%. The best monkey saw their stock increase by 168%!

Overall, the monkeys’ portfolio increased by 38.4%, turning my $1650 investment into $2283! Meanwhile, the benchmark Russell 3000 index “only” increased by 24.6%.

I’m running a similar competition in 2022. We will pick a random portfolio of stocks and compare their performance against the S&P 500 as a whole. Can the “random monkeys” win back-to-back? Time will tell!

The Random Monkeys

Some of The Best Interest’s 5000+ Twitter followers are this year’s monkeys. They don’t realize it, but I asked them to randomly select stocks for our portfolio.

I asked them in December:

Want to help with a fun project on The Best Interest?

Respond below with:

– a number between 1-50
– a letter

— Jesse Cramer (@BestInterest_JC) December 20, 2021

…and exactly 50 people responded. But what did I do with letter/number submissions?

I took each letter and found the first stock in the S&P 500 that starts with that letter. Then I took the number and counted down (alphabetically) stock-by-stock equal to that number.

For example, Justin from the Road to Wealth Podcast responded to my request with J42. Starting at the beginning of the letter J (Jack Henry and Associates, ticker = JKHY), I counted down 42 companies in alphabetical order, ending up on Martin Marietta Materials (MLM). Thus, MLM is in our 2022 Monkey Portfolio.

Rinse and repeat for all 50 submissions to my Twitter request.

The result is the portfolio listed in this Google sheet. Take a look!

Why Do This In The First Place?

Why run these quirky little competitions?

First, it’s fun! Setting this up and tracking it over the year is a neat little project.

But second, it’s instructive. It’s a terrific lesson in luck vs. skill in the stock market.

I hope you follow along for the fun and knowledge in 2022!

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We’ll talk to you soon!